camp ewalu

This week Sarah and I spent our time at Camp Ewalu, in Northeast Iowa near the town of Strawberry Point. This was our first time at Ewalu, but we found ourselves able to plug into their program fairly easily. Ewalu is set up differently than any camp Sarah and I had worked at during our years on summer camp staffs. Firstly, Ewalu is situated on a 550 acre site, which means it spreads out – a lot. This space allows for the camp to have a very decentralized set-up. Different groups on camp can go much of the day without really seeing each other because worship, meals, and activities are done amongst the different programs rather than all together in a central location.

I spent much of my week bouncing around between two different groups, the Pioneers (going into 7th grade) and the Native Americans (6th grade). Sarah spent most of her time with the Trailblazers (5th grade) and Explorers (4th grade). We were able to worship, sit in on Bible Studies, play games, do chores on the farm, and do much hiking with these groups. We also got to go on a couple of fieldtrips, Sarah to an animal rescue and me to a state park on the Mississippi River.

These age groups can keep the staff busy and tired, but they did an excellent job with their energy this week in playing and worshiping God. While Ewalu may have had the most anxiety for us being that we knew nothing about it, we left feeling welcome and inspired by a staff committed to the mission of outdoor ministry and sharing God’s love with the children who came to camp this summer.

Brahm Semmler-Smith

Thinking about vocation through history

Walter Brueggemann once wrote that "we are heirs to revolutionary imaginations and songs." But sometimes we are heirs to actual revolutionaries, too, faith forebears whose contexts forced them to give their lives for their faith.

Last week, taking advantage of some summertime free time, I had the opportunity to visit two historical sites, one the home of a priest in the nineteenth century and the other the home of a priest in the twentieth century. Both visits have me thinking about vocation, and how vocation manifests itself, both then and now.

Miguel Hidalgo, 1753-1811

Miguel Hidalgo was born in 1753, in Guanajuato, Mexico, to a criollo family. In the absurdly complicated hierarchy of race and class in the Spanish colonies, criollos were those of European descent but who were born in the New World. Due to the location of their birth, criollos faced a legally institutionalized glass ceiling above which they could not rise.

Still, criollos were the equivalent of the upper middle class, and as such young Miguel was provided with an advanced education; eventually, he entered seminary and was ordained a priest when he was in his early twenties. From there he went on to teach at a prestigious school in Morelia, and before long became known as a hotshot young scholar, surely destined for great things.

During the decade he taught as a professor, however, he gained a reputation of one who was, to use the dreaded term, “unorthodox,” in his teaching as well as in his lifestyle. He earned the nickname el zorro, the fox (not to be confused with the masked “Zorro” of Mexican California). Father Hidalgo, in other words, attracted attention to himself, and in these days of the Inquisition, drawing attention to yourself could get you in trouble in short order. In 1804 he was transferred from his prestigious seminary post to a remote rural parish, presumably banished there as if it were Siberia, never, the powers that be hoped, to be heard from again. “But this reassignment,” as one of the museums I visited put it, “proved to be fateful.”

In his new rural parish in Dolores, Father Hidalgo’s life took a dramatic turn. Rather than treating his assignment as a punishment, he threw himself into the collective life of his parishioners, organizing a pottery cooperative, cultivating silk and planting vineyards. He learned several indigenous languages and reached out to the lowest social castes. In other words, the Mexico Semester Program might say, Father Hidalgo became a practicing liberation theologian more than a century before the term would be invented. (He also, it should be noted, faced the pitfalls of liberation theology, coming under criticism from contemporaries for neglecting his parishioners’ spiritual lives, as well as for his general “restlessness.”)

Within a few years of arriving in Dolores, Father Hidalgo met Ignacio Allende, a fellow criollo discontent (nearby San Miguel de Allende would be named for him). In 1808, when Napoleon destabilized the Spanish monarchy, Hidalgo, Allende, and several fellow conspirators began plotting their next move. A plan was formed to declare independence – and with it armed rebellion against Spanish rule – in the city of Queretaro in November 1810. In September, however, Hidalgo received word that the plot had been uncovered by the authorities, who were on their way to arrest the rebels. The conspirators fled to Dolores, where they hurriedly met in Hidalgo’s house to discuss their options. There was little time and few alternatives. By the early morning hours, a decision had been made.

At 5:30 in the morning on September 16, long before sunrise and the normal time for church, Hidalgo rang the bells of the parish, the Parroquia de Nuestra Señora de Dolores, or the Parish of Our Lady of Pains, named for an image of Mary in which the mother of Jesus suffers at the sight of her son being crucified. Hidalgo’s cry for independence would become known as the Grito de Dolores, named for the town and its parish church but which, thanks to this coincidental background, literally translates as “the cry of pain.” From this parish named for the Virgin Mary, Hidalgo and his ragtag army went forth carrying a flag with, as a symbol of their American identity, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on it. With a history like this, is it any wonder that I think of Mexico as the land of Maria?

Well. With a story like that, I knew I had to make a pilgrimage. Before dawn last Thursday morning I boarded a bus, and five hours later I finally roll in to the tiny but bustling town of Dolores Hidalgo, in the misty mountains of central Guanajuato.

I pull out my Lonely Planet guidebook and study its street map of Dolores. The central plaza is only a few blocks north of the bus station, so I start walking in what I hope is the right direction and I reach the plaza within a few minutes.

I head to the church first, and walk inside. It’s surprisingly beautiful, though poorly maintained. There is a Taxco-like churrigueresque façade and churrigueresque side altars, all impossibly detailed sculptures of stone, metal, and wood. I sit for a moment in the pews, then walk outside, pausing at the door to look out on the plaza, as I imagine Hidalgo did on that fateful morning. Next to the church entrance is an 8-foot-tall pillar with an electronic counter on it counting down the days to Mexico’s 2010 bicentennial. 447 days, 11 hours, 39 minutes, and 7 seconds… 6 seconds… 5 seconds…

From the parish church the rebels went to the town jail and freed all the prisoners, and so I, walking their path, walked the few short blocks to the prison, which is now the Museum of National Independence. Father Hidalgo, the museum tells me, was eventually captured and executed less than six months after crying the grito from the doors of his parish church. After being shot by a firing squad, his head was cut off and placed in a birdcage so that it could be hung in a prominent place in the city of Guanajuato as a symbol to would-be rebels. Hidalgo’s decomposing head hung there for ten long years while the war dragged on, but after the war was eventually sent to Mexico City where it was buried under the Monument to Independence.

And that was about all I needed to do in Dolores – and I needed to be getting home besides, what with my five-hour bus ride ahead of me – so I snapped a few more photos of the plaza and the church, grabbed a torta to go at a popular-looking restaurant, and bought a ticket for the first leg of my several-stage journey home.

Toribio Romo, 1900-1928

Santo Toribio Romo, for those who haven’t been to the interior of Mexico recently, is quite possibly the most popular saint in the country. To be fair, he does face stiff competition from San Judas Tadeo, whose image is everywhere in Mexico City. But the omnipresence of Toribio Romo’s black-and-white mug is powerful, and growing.

There are at least two obvious reasons for this popularity. One is that Santo Toribio Romo is becoming the unofficial patron saint of immigrants to the United States – especially those who cross the border on foot, without papers, under the natural threat of a deadly waterless desert and the man-made dangers of the Border Patrol, the Minutemen, and immense risk involved in choosing a responsible coyote. Is it any wonder that the God-fearing faithful, who have always cried out for divine intervention in their most dire moments, would find help from a spiritual source? For these vulnerable travelers, Santo Toribio often shows up as a guardian angel, helping the migrant through a tough spot before mysteriously disappearing into the darkness. We rationalists may scoff, but the stories – and the faith of the people – are growing.

The other reason for Santo Toribio Romo’s popularity, however, is that unlike San Judas Tadeo, Santo Toribio is certifiably Mexican. He was born on April 16, 1900, right here in the highlands of Jalisco, dirt poor. He grew up under the shadow of the Virgen de San Juan de Los Lagos, and entered the seminary in San Juan when he was only 12 years old, to be ordained as a priest by the time he was 22. But of course, by now, thanks to my endless ramblings about it, you know that the 1920s were a dangerous time to be a priest in Mexico. As the government cracked down on religious practice, Toribio Romo rebelled – not with guns and knives, but instead by continuing to administer the sacraments to his people. On February 25, 1928, government troops finally caught up with him in the town of Tequila. He was shot to death in his bedroom. (He was my age, 28, when he died.)

Pope John Paul II canonized Toribio Romo as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church in 2000. Twenty-four other martyrs of the Cristero Rebellion were also canonized, but none of them have yet reached Santo Toribio’s popularity. Aiding his belovedness, Chris and I have surmised, is the arresting photograph of Santo Toribio that serves as his image. His eyes are almost sad, but fixed and firm, as if they are seeing his future and he is deciding in that moment that though it is not pleasant it is the path God has called him to, and he will not waver from it. Is it any wonder the saints are stand-ins for Jesus, stepping-stones to Christ?

Well. Enough background. On Tuesday last week I decided to visit this Mexican miracle-worker, to see Santo Toribio for myself. Santo Toribio’s shrine is in Santa Ana de Guadalupe, a tiny, tiny, tiny village outside of Jalostotitlan, a small town in northern Jalisco state. When my regional bus arrived in Jalos, it dropped me off at a street corner office that served as the Jalos bus station.

I walked over to the office and asked the man in an official-looking uniform how to get to Santa Ana de Guadalupe. He stared at me blankly and pointed at the corner where I had just gotten off the bus. Apparently this was the bus stop. As I was turning to go, another group of people who had been on the same bus – an friendly older gentleman and two women who seemed to be about the same age – came up and asked the official-looking person about Santo Toribio. I decide to follow these people.

When the little bus arrived, I and my (unsuspecting) traveling companions got on board and we all rattled our way out of town. We turn down a dirt road and pass under a stone arch that announces the place of Toribio Romo. There is nothing but dry grass and desert trees around this shrine; nothing is visible from here. The bus driver – who is extremely friendly – drops us off at a street corner, but I don’t see anything resembling a church. Not wanting to seem uncertain, I spot a weathered tourist sign and walk firmly toward it. It’s the right move – when I reach the sign, I immediately see the stone church around the corner.

It’s almost shockingly small. Later I discover that Padre Toribio built this church himself, organizing the people and resources to get a church built in his hometown. This explains the church’s size, but still: This is the land of massive parish churches and towering basilicas stuck in the middle of small rural cities, yet the shrine for one of Mexico’s most popular saints is a tiny stone sanctuary far outside of town.

As I walk through the church doors, a woman next to me drops to her knees, and then begins shuffling up to the altar. What is it with this shuffling up to the altar on your knees thing? People do it in San Juan, too, and I’m always bewildered by it. On the one hand, it’s beautiful piety, a powerful expression of devotion that even a Protestant can’t help but respect. On the other hand, what kind of God – or Virgin or saint – wants you to shuffle up to their throne on your knees? I understand it rationally – puny human before powerful deity – but this physical submissiveness doesn’t exactly make me feel full of love for the Lord.

On the other other hand, I continue to be amazed by the Mexican faithful’s use of physical acts in their religious practice. From the Christmastime posada parades to the outdoor theater of Good Friday, Mexican Catholicism gives you something to do and not just something to think. I’ve come all the way out to see Santo Toribio – now what? I can pray silently in my head, and I do, but as I watch the woman shuffle up to the altar I find myself wishing I had something physical and physically demanding I could do during my pilgrimage, to cap it off. I make a note to file this away for further reflection later.

Outside, in the “backyard” of the little church, I find a long walkway leading to another little church. This is the Calzada de los Maritires, or Walkway of the Martyrs. All along the little stone path there are cement busts and inscribed plaques to the other Cristero martyrs. Most of them are from Jalisco, but there are a few from Zacatecas, too, and at least one each in the northern border states of Durango and Chihuahua, and one, I am surprised to find, from the southern state of Guerrero.

In the middle of this walkway, there is a monument to Christ the King and the Virgin of Guadalupe, a visible rendering of the Cristero martyrs’ final cry: ¡Viva Cristo Rey y la Virgen de Guadalupe! Long live Christ the King and the Virgin of Guadalupe! The monument itself is a curious one. There is a black cross. On one side of the cross is Jesus, his arms up in the air and wearing the cloth of resurrection – this is “viva Christo Rey.” On the other side of the cross is the Virgin of Guadalupe, life size. They are positioned like two sides of the same coin – or two sides of the same cross. I have no idea what this means theologically, but it’s got to be worth a paper or two in a systematic theology class.

At the end of the walkway is another stone church, about the same size as the first one. Later Chris tells me this other church was built by Santo Toribio’s family after his death. Next to the church is a replica of Toribio Romo’s childhood home. It’s like one of those 18th or 19th century homes you can visit in certain national parks, complete with furnishings from the era. This one is about the size of the living room in our apartment in Lagos. Later Chris tells me that Toribio Romo’s parents raised five kids in this one-room log cabin. The point, she tells me, is that they were dirt poor. I try to take a photo of the house, but it’s difficult to capture without the fancy restaurant built just behind it.

On my visit I miss the retablo room, where visitors put thank-you notes, thank-you paintings, and random thank-you items like soccer jerseys on the walls as an offering of gratitude to Santo Toribio. Chris tells me that on her visit one retablo struck her especially: A family gave thanks to Santo Toribio Romo for helping them to finally find the body of their daughter who had died in her attempt to cross the border. For these parents, the miracle was that their daughter did not disappear in the desert like so many other sons and daughters who perish in the wilderness; against all odds, they found her body, they could bury her, they could have closure.

As I leave the place of Santo Toribio, I notice his photo over a doorframe on a nearby house. I gaze at it as I sit on the side of the country road, waiting for the little bus to come back and take me home.

Two Priests, Two Paths, One Faith

Toribio Romo and Miguel Hidalgo, for all their differences in character and context, were both priests, ordained ministers, each of whom had served his parishioners in a very particular way. Each found himself opposed to powerful forces, and each, in the service of his parishioners, led their parishioners in resistance to those forces, specifically those forces that they believed threatened their parishioners’ ability to live as God intended them to live. Am I oversimplifying? Of course – but bear with me for a moment.

Toribio Romo refused armed rebellion, but he did choose a path of resistance when he continued to administer the holy sacraments to his people in full violation of the law, an act of liturgy-as-resistance that brings to mind William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist. Miguel Hidalgo, on the other hand, rejected the brutal hierarchies of his day by forging cross-cultural, cross-class relationships and building up the community of his parish through cooperative economic life. And then, unlike Toribio, he chose the path of taking up arms, uttered the Cry of Pains, and unleashed a bloody war that quickly spiraled out of his control. That last part is easy to glorify as history but hard to justify as principle; if I were writing the story as an ideal I think I'd prefer a peaceful resistance akin to MLK or Ghandi’s spiritually-sourced people’s movements.

Still, I’m holding my pilgrimages to the places of Toribio Romo and Miguel Hidalgo in my head and in my heart this week, two examples of priestly vocation lived out in the Americas in the last two centuries. They are worth remembering, I think, as I continue to ponder the vocation of ordained ministry in the Americas in the twenty-first century, and as I prepare to take my adventures back across the border.

A Visit with Christ the King

Writer's note: In the fall I was part of the first-ever Mexico Semester, a study abroad program that any LSTC student is invited to take part in. While I've completed that program, during the spring my wife and I have continued exploring Mexico while she researches for her dissertation on religious devotion and I prepare for internship. The following is one of our many adventures.


On Sunday we decided to take a day trip to the mountains of neighboring Guanajuato state. Our goal was to reach El Cubilete del Cristo Rey – the "tumbling" hill of Christ the King, where there is a towering statue of Jesus on top of a mountain that is said to be in the exact geographic center of Mexico. Mountain? Towering statue? Jesus? That sounds like an adventure to me…

We awoke just before dawn. Chris made tortas – crusty-bread sandwiches with Mexican fillings (we like beans, avocado, tomato, and chipotle) - for a midday picnic, and we headed out to catch a third-class bus to neighboring León (about an hour, see previous blog post), crossing the state line into Guanajuato in the process. From León we needed to take another third-class bus to the smaller city of Silao (another hour), and then, from the bus station in Silao, we boarded what looked like a small school bus that would take us up the long and winding – and rocky – road to… well, to Jesus.

Along the way we gazed out the windows at some of the most jaw-dropping landscapes we’ve yet seen here, making the ride itself as much of an experience as… well, as Jesus. Mainly this was because we left the highways that we usually ride on the bus for much, much smaller roads. The photos I took (see the photo album) are, I think, some of the most “Mexican” I’ve taken so far, in the sense that they fill the American stereotype of what rural Mexico looks like. Stereotype or not, I love what these photos were able to capture.

Cubilete de Cristo Rey

Dry semi-deserts patched with small green trees and smaller brown shrubs. Rolling fields of tequila-producing blue agave plants. A horse tied up under a tree. A woman walking along the side of the road with a child in her arms. The towers of a European-looking church placed seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A little burro – yes, a burrito – poking his head around for something to eat as the bus rolls by. And – though I took no pictures of them – there were beggars, mostly women and children, the children dirty and mostly in old torn clothing, sometimes alone, looking lost.

And the bus rolled on, on and on and on, going up the edges of the mountain on a road paved with rocks that made the whole bus bounce continuously, even as it whipped around hairpin turns that left you peering over the edge of a valley that seemed to withdraw farther and farther away. As the bus drew near to the summit - as we ascended to Jesus - food stands started cropping up along the side of the road. No McDonald’s here, only family fondas, outdoor diners set up like long tables around which people gathered to eat home-cooked, home-stewed, home-grilled food, served in brown clay pots and heavy gray molcajetes.

Finally we approached the monument itself, and the bus stopped to let everyone off. An older gentleman tapped us on the shoulder and told us not to follow everyone else because it was quicker up the back staircase. He was right. And then there he – He? – was, Jesus himself, standing tall on the top of the mountain.

Chris had visited this monument before, on her last trip to Mexico in 2006. When she shared her adventures with her academic adviser, a Catholic himself (and also working on research this year in nearby San Luis Potosi), he remembered his own visit here and recalled he found this particular monument to Christ the King “kind of Stalinist.” I suppose that assessment had me prepared for just about anything.

The heavy metal Jesus has his arms out at his sides, palms mostly down, as if he is attempting to calm a stormy world. Two cherubic angels stand at his sides, one on his left holding up a royal crown, the other on his right holding up a crown of thorns. Jesus himself stands on a spherical structure that looks something like a globe. Underneath the concrete globe is a small sanctuary, of which the most striking thing is a massive bronze crown of thorns that, just above our heads, rings the ceiling of the entire circular sanctuary. Also above our heads, some ways above this crown of thorns, is a more traditionally royal crown, smaller in size.

We left the sanctuary and wandered over to the information panels on the edge of the monument platform. They told the story of how and when the monument was built, as well as a little history on the Christian concept of Christ the King.

The festival of Christ the King, which takes place every year in late November – even in Lutheran churches – was made part of the church calendar by papal encyclical in 1925, notably not during but between the great wars. A decade later, this region of Mexico – northern Jalisco, southern Zacatecas, and here in western Guanajuato – put the concept into very concrete practice.

When the government began a brutal repression of Roman Catholicism in the 1930s, a number of priests and laypeople resisted. Some priests continued to offer the sacraments and were executed, later to be named martyrs of the church. And while priests and bishops officially refused to support a violent rebellion, many laypeople did take up arms. When they were killed, they were said to have cried a very curious rebel yell: ¡Viva Cristo Rey! Long live Christ the King!

How quickly the world turns: Only ten years after what became known as the Cristero War, this massive monument to Christ the King was built, without government interference, in the heart of rebel territory, in a place that martyrs called home, in the very center of Mexico, a powerful symbol of what these Cristeros stood for.

But of course, the Cristero War, like any war, was hardly black-and-white. One of Chris’ host families from a previous visit continues to have a tenuous relationship with the Church because the family patriarch was beaten and robbed by raiding bands of Cristero rebels. Some historians continue to claim that the Cristiada was fomented by wealthy landowners who saw their power threatened by a newly socialist government; they, like so many others, used the power of religion to protect their possessions and keep out any threats to the status quo.

None of this means that there weren’t everyday Catholics who desperately sought out the sacraments from outlaw priests; none of it nullifies Padre Toribio Romo’s faithful dedication to his vocation, even in the face of state violence and repression. But this is the messy nature of giving Christ the man-made title of “king.” It inevitably ends in a knotty tangle of the secular and the sacred, of monarchism and monotheism. The golden crown may hide the blood better than a thorny one, but there is always blood, always, always.

Well. I suppose I should save any more meditations on Christ the King for November, or it will threaten to take over this entire blog post like Napoleon on a European rampage. And, anyway, you can only look at the monument to Cristo Rey for so long before your gaze is pulled away, in our case by the earthly landscape that lay all around us – and by the clouds that were now at eye level.

At this altitude your breath gets shorter; there’s not quite as much oxygen as down below. But the view takes your breath away anyway. We looked out over the bajio – the famous fertile lowlands of this region of Mexico – and to the dusty mountains that border it. Just a little lower on this particular mountain, a soccer match was taking place on a dirt pitch in the place where the mountain had been flattened out a bit. It reminded me of the ruins of an ancient Aztec ball court in the mountains of Xochicalco, near Cuernavaca. Outdoor team sports have been in Mexico for a long, long time…

We stopped in a little convenience store inside the monument to buy some cold Cokes for our picnic lunch – is Christ the king even over Coca-Cola? ...sometimes it’s hard to tell – and stuffed ourselves on bean-and-avocado sandwiches. We sat peacefully at the mountain’s summit for a little while longer, and then it was time to go. Leaving Jesus on his mountain, we boarded the yellow school bus and made our winding way back down to the ground, another adventure come to an end.

The Omnivore's Reading Choices

“…and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself…” Mark 4:27

I finally finished Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, after about a month of listening to it on audiotape. Chris and I are both reading (listening to) it, as we’d heard so much about its contents from various sources, but this surely marks the first time that I have finished a book faster than my book-devouring spouse. It’s true, this might be due to her trying to complete a massive dissertation research-gathering project right now, but I’m taking a victory any way I can get it. (Commence classic Queen song… now.)

Anyway, the book’s title refers to the dilemma posed by the ancient and still daily question, “What should we eat for dinner?” Pollan divides the options into four broad categories, each of which he sees as typical of the process that led to it: First, a trip to the McDonald’s drive-thru, the end of the industrial food chain; second, a trip to Whole Foods, the a symbol of the organic-yet-still-industrial food chain; third, a trip to Polyface Farm, a place hewing hardcore to the values of an organic-and-intensely-local food chain; and fourth, an adventure hunting and gathering for food in the wild. Along the way Pollan uses his first question, “What should we eat for dinner?” to get at a much deeper question, namely “What kind of people are we?” – or maybe even more elementally, “Who are we?”

It’s a tall order for a single book, and as with most similarly ambitious projects The Omnivore’s Dilemma is full of absolutely fascinating reporting, rollickingly fun stories, and lots of question-raising – as well as, yes, a few sections where the implied argument is a little thin. But it’s well worth your reading time – and I’d especially put “your” in the plural here, as it is capable of spawning all sorts of discussions around what you and yours eat. It’s certainly sparked conversation at our little two-person dinner table.

As the book came to an end I was struck by a surprise move in Pollan’s story of his “fourth” meal. Not a religious man in any explicit way elsewhere in the book, Pollan suddenly feels moved by an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the food he is about to serve his dinner guests. His time hunting and gathering has somehow left him with a profound sense that the food he has acquired is not of his own making.

Oh, he spent plenty of time doing “work,” to be sure, trudging through the forest, on his hands and knees looking for mushrooms and even learning to shoot a gun in order to hunt for the first time, but somehow what he gained during his time spent outdoors was an deep sense of his own reliance on the work of the natural world for his sustenance and survival. Whatever chemical compounds our science provides us with – and it provides us with a lot – it is all but secondary work. “We eat by the grace of nature,” Pollan concludes, “not industry.”

What a thing to read during a week when the appointed Gospel reading has Jesus painting a picture of that very “grace of nature.” “The kingdom of God,” Jesus says,” is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow – he does not know how. The earth,” Jesus tells us, “produces of itself.” The “grace of nature,” indeed.

Yet as Jesus tells the parable, the small and scattered seeds do not simply grow for the sake of growing. They do not grow in order to compete, they do not strangle each other, they do not drown each other out to see who will be the tallest. True, the mustard seed, smallest of all seeds – and a weed at that – does grow to be, Jesus tells us, the “greatest of all shrubs,” but in Jesus’ parable, to be “the greatest” is not merely the end of some great natural game. Rather, even the mustard seed’s champion flourishing is in the service of something else.

What is that something else? I believe Jesus gave us two stories here for a reason. Each seed produces some different result, carries the chemical blueprint to infuse its plant with some specific qualities. Some shoot straight up in the air like grain stalks, some spread out all around like shrubs, some are brown, some green, some in orderly rows, some in a messy sprawl.

But the two plants – the precious grain and the pesky mustard seed – do have something in common. Both serve the rest of creation. They do not exist for their individual selves. They do not even exist only for their own kind. No, these seeds are grace-grown to be servants for the other creatures. In the parables Jesus tells us here, the seed-plants’ fruits end up serving creation at a very, very basic level: Food, and shelter.

Food: The first seed begins scattered but then grows up, step-by-deliberate-step – “first the stalk, then the grain, then the full grain in the head” – into a harvest to be gathered by someone who carries a sickle – in other words, it passes its work off, relay-style, to someone who knows what she is doing and will probably soon send that grain on to become bread that ultimately finds its way to someone who is hungry. The first seed, though it began scattered, ends up feeding the hungry.

Shelter: The second seed grows up into a mustard shrub, a garden pest, one we would at first glance be most likely to see as useless, and yet, somehow, infused with the grace of God’s kingdom, explodes beyond maybe even its own imagination and ends up as something more akin to the great and noble cedar tree Ezekiel prophesies in our Old Testament reading. And then, like his mountaintop forebear, the mustard shrub offers his inexplicably large branches to the birds of the air, that they might make nests in its shade. The second seed, though it began smallest of all, ends up sheltering the homeless.

So who are we, after all? The answer to that question must, as we have seen, begin with grace. “We eat by the grace of nature,” says Michael Pollan, and we know that this natural truth is but one reflection of the deeper truth about grace, that it saves us from death (and a deathly life) from day to day and from age to age. Saved at the seed, we grow up and out into the purpose for which we, as we remembered only two weeks ago on Pentecost, are sent, by the grace of God.

It is true: To live by grace, to grow by grace, is to be sent by grace. Like the grace-grown plant life in today’s parables, we, too, are grown for a purpose. We are sent, whether we, like the grain stalks, feed the hungry in our world, or whether we, like the absurd mustard shrub-turned-cedar tree, shelter the shelter-less in our neighborhood. There are many tasks to be done in the work God calls us to – but God sends many seeds to do them. May we sprout and grow as God’s seeds. Gracias a Dios.

Progressive Pentecost

All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Acts 2:4


A rush of wind and suddenly you’re fluent? If only learning a new language were always this easy.

I’ve spent the last three years trying to learn Spanish. Back in 2006, when I first realized we would spend a year in Latin America, I started listening to audiotapes like a man on a mission. Thirty hours of repetition later, I knew quite a few phrases and I had started to get a sense for verbs in the present tense. But when I tried to watch TV shows in Spanish – a dubbed version of The Simpsons, for example – I still needed English-language subtitles to understand exactly why Homer was running for Springfield sanitation commissioner.

For the next two years I set Spanish on the shelf in order to learn the more, um, “useful” languages of Greek and Hebrew, but by 2008 there was nothing for it: It was time to take the plunge into full Spanish immersion.

First a three-week “Spanish Language for Ministry” program in Cuernavaca, where I learned the very, very basics by day and lived in a Mexican home by night. The first week of the program was wonderful, full of the adrenaline rush of new things, but by the second week I was frustrated at the slow progress I was making. I wasn’t learning as much as I’d wanted to as fast as I’d wanted to. Yet I got over many fears during those three weeks, and had some of my first great triumphs of using Spanish out in the real world.

Over the next several months I spent every weekend with a Mexican family. I tried sharing what we’d learned in Bible study with my very patient host mom, who was no doubt used to dealing with foreigners whose language skills were feeble at best. I talked Mexican soccer with my host dad, describing as well as I could how much I was enjoying attending soccer matches at the massive Mexico City stadiums. I had countless awkward conversations with their teenage kids, who had as little an idea of what to say to us as we did to them. And I watched hours of Spanish-dubbed Disney Channel TV shows with their youngest son, whose boundless energy brought a smile to everyone’s face. Yet in nearly every interaction I was painfully aware of my inability to speak in any tense other than the present. I cringed whenever I translated the tenses I was saying into English, imagining how awful I must sound. I knew I could do better with a good textbook and some well-organized teaching.

So in January and February I took six more weeks of Spanish language courses in a certified Spanish language school. We breezed through one textbook, supplementing its verb charts with computer-based exercises and in-class conversations. I gave oral presentations on current events and debated the merits of Guadalajara soccer teams with my teacher. I made lots of progress over these winter months, improving my ability to read, write, and speak the language of my new home country at a level and a pace that I’d always hoped for. And then, just as we were passing the halfway point of our second textbook, it was time to move again, out of the city – and far from any language school.

Over the next three months in the rural ranchlands of Jalisco I felt the well-structured grammar I’d learned in class slowly slip away, withering without the constant tending of daily homework and weekly exams. No doubt this feeling of hard-earned learning slipping through my fingers like sand contributed to the frustrated restlessness I couldn’t seem to shake off during the long, dry month of April.

And yet, as it so often happens, even while I was staring at the skies looking for answers, God was hard at work on the earth below. By May there were a handful of people around Lagos de Moreno who knew us by name and who seemed to relish the opportunity to speak with a couple of gringos from out of town. And somehow, over three months here, my ability to speak with them flourished.

“¿Que hay?” the barista at our favorite coffee shop says every time I walk in, using one of the Mexican equivalents of “What’s up?” He always seems to be expecting me – which makes sense, since I go there nearly every day. During the Mexican soccer season, Chris asked him where we could go in Lagos to watch a Chivas game. He recommended La Cura, a seafood bar where the most die-hard Chivas fanaticos gathered every Saturday night to watch their beloved Rebaño. Watching the Chivas-America Superclasico match there, shrimp-spiked michelada in hand, is a memory I’ll cherish nearly as much as the Superclasico we watched live at Estadio Azteca.

Across town, nearer to our apartment, is the Super-Fruteria El Gordo Salazar Jr. (phew!), the Lagos equivalent of Hyde Park Produce back home. The manager of the super-fruteria, a young guy with a big smile, has been super-friendly to us since the first time Chris stopped in for groceries. At first, I used to wait outside with our backpacks while Chris shopped, and the friendly fruteriero would ask Chris why I was afraid to come inside. When I finally did begin going inside the store – nearly every day – he grinned. “¿No tienes miedo?” You’re not afraid? No, I said, I’m not afraid, shaking my head with an embarrassed smile.

Now the fear, real or imagined, is a distant memory. On Wednesday he noticed my Chicago Fire jersey and asked me if I liked “el fut” (i.e. soccer). Of course, I answered. “Then are you going to watch the game today, Barcelona and Manchester United? Barcelona is my team. How about you?” Eeesh. I don’t really know, I told him, I only really watch Mexican and MLS soccer, not so much the European leagues… “Ah, but these teams are the best in the world! You have to watch. It’s on at 2:00 today. At 2:00!” So I did. And the next day, when he asked me if I watched the match, I could respond affirmatively. And congratulate him on his team’s victory.

Then there’s the owner of a local pizza place, where we always watch Mexican National Team matches. Like the barista, he, too, has a brother in the States he hasn’t seen in years.

And there’s the lady who runs the corner convenience store across the street. She always apologizes about the dust on the jugs of drinking water we buy, as if there were some way to avoid dust in this time before the rains.

There’s the man who runs a tailor shop next door to our apartment gate. Chris always says hello to him, but I continue to hold a silent grudge ever since he scolded Adam and I for playing soccer in the driveway.

There’s even my barber, who remembered me – with surprising joy – when I went in for a second haircut a few weeks ago. He hopes I’ll come back one more time before I leave.

And then, of course, there’s Luis. Yesterday he came by ostensibly to practice his English, but over the next three hours (!) we conversed in our usual English-Spanish hybrid – mostly Spanish, but trying English words whenever Spanish words didn’t seem to be hitting their mark. My conversations with Luis can be wide-ranging; at one point I explained that the lead singer of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Luis’s favorite band, is actually from California even though he writes all his songs about the Louisiana bayou. “Ah,” Luis says, nodding, “It would be like if you, from Chicago, were to write all of your songs about Lagos de Moreno!” Exactly. ☺

But yesterday Luis said something that surprised me. “Your Spanish,” he said,” has become much better.” Nah, I said, waving away what I took to be an empty compliment. “No,” he insisted, “When you first arrived you had so much fear, you’d hardly spoke at all. Now you’re speaking a lot, and getting better and better…” And it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, he might be right.

I’m a long way from being fluent, I really am. As one who’s loved grammar since he was in eighth grade (thanks, Mrs. Smith), it still pains me not to have proper verb conjugation at the tip of my tongue. My vocabulary is in the stratosphere compared to where it was a year ago and I’m even getting pretty good at understanding and pronunciation, but I still have interactions, like the unfortunate and, truth be told, rather terrifying interaction I had with an immigration official in the Guadalajara airport.

And yet, and yet. Little by little, step by step, paso a paso, I am beginning to speak in another language. As the Spirit, mysterious as she is, moving around like the wind, at her own pace, in her own unpredictable directions, is giving me ability. She has taken her sweet time, but she is filling me up, fanning my Pentecostal fire.

This slow-cooked version of speaking another language, filled as it is with imperfections, fits and false starts, and continued learning over a long period of time, is very different from how we often think of the Spirit’s work. It’s certainly different from the way we read the second chapter of Acts. WHOOOSH! a rush of wind and then BAM! you can suddenly speak another language – fluently and without missteps, we presume. If only it were that easy.

In the run-up to our Mexico trip I tried everything to get into Spanish-language ministry experiences. But always I faced the same roadblock. “Are you fluent? No? Well, then you're outta luck.” And so I was rejected from multilingual ministry because I wasn’t starting with fluency. And I thought, if this is our model, then our church will never be a multicultural church.

I’m not complaining about those rejections today, though there was a time when I did. Sometimes, I’ve come to understand, those decisions were, given the individual situation, for the best. And, as for me, I like my life the way it turned out better than the hypothetical way I’d planned it in my head. But I learned something from those come-fluent-or-go-home roadblocks, something that leads me to challenge the attitude that permits only the fluent to go forward.

In a sermon my first year at LSTC, my advisor, Dr. Richard Perry, urged the student body to take some uncomfortable first steps in learning a new language. He acknowledged that we’d probably feel pretty awkward at first, and tried himself to use a few Spanish words while we all laughed. But that was the point. Perfection – fluency – wasn’t where we started. A step was where we started. A word, two words, a phrase. Enough to make that first connection with someone else, someone you thought was so different you’d never bridge that gap. But you do, with those first awkward steps.

And then there will be a few more steps. And a few more after that. And eventually, the Spirit will fill you up. She will give you ability. Sometimes she takes her time, avoiding shortcuts and taking the long way round. But she will get you there. She will.

Eventually. Gracias a Dios.

Cielos Nublados

When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. Acts 1:9

Clouds. There are more of them here in north-central Mexico now, more of them then there were before. Vienen las lluvias – the rains are coming, announce the hardware stores. Showers of actual rain are still rare, but the cielos nublados, cloudy skies, with their nubes gordos, fat clouds, are harbingers of the falling water to come.

Here in the neighborhood of La Luz, people are so desperate for clouds that they make their own. In an annual celebration of their patron virgen, Santa Maria de La Luz, laypeople at the domed, medieval-looking church at the bottom of the hill are sending off powerful explosive CRACKs that bounce off the mountains and hillsides of town, setting off car alarms and leaving behind, high in the air, a puff of cloudy smoke that quickly dissipates in the wind.

Clouds have long been a source of human fascination. We stare up at them, imagining what familiar objects they might look like. Sometimes we even look up to the clouds and find God. My new Green Letter Bible lists more references to Clouds than to such stereotypically Biblical nature objects as Deserts, Seeds, and Vineyards. Even Rain has fewer references than its mother, the Cloud. First God creates clouds, covering the planet with them in Genesis, and then by Exodus the Lord is using clouds to speak to Moses, to fill the temple, to lead the people by day. God uses clouds so much that when Job asks, “Can anyone understand the clouds?” it’s clear the poor man is just asking, in another way, Can anyone understand God?

Of course, the clouds are not God; rather, they simply become one of God’s primary traveling cloaks, a traveling tool God uses whenever God decides it’s time for a formal visit. The writer of Psalm 104 sees this pattern and calls the clouds God’s Winnebago: “You make the clouds your chariot.” “The Lord is riding on a swift cloud,” Isaiah says, continuing the transportation theme. For all the fun with winged wheels, though, the point, for both Isaiah and the Psalmist, is that the clouds are a sign that God is coming – or that God is already here.

Which is why it comes as a bit of a shock when the clouds come, in our Ascension Day readings, to take Jesus away. The disciples stand openmouthed, dumbfounded. It wasn’t that they didn’t expect clouds to be involved. Clouds always seemed to be showing up at important moments. Matthew records a voice coming out of a cloud at Jesus’ baptism, Mark writes of a cloud overshadowing the Transfiguration, and Luke tells us of Jesus’ proclamation that in the last days people will see “the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and glory.” But that a cloud would come to take Jesus away? Away? Whatever can this mean?

When the clouds come, they bring a change. Here in Jalisco, the weather is cooler now with the clouds hovering over us; there is relief from the unrelenting heat of the sun but new cause to throw on a jacket. Soon there will be more cracks in the sky, accompanied by their fiery bolts of light, and the waters will come. Farmers will rejoice. And the season will change.

I walk up to the roof to see about the need for that jacket. The clouds are increasing, rolling heavily through an overcast sky. Vienen las llluvias, the hardware store announces. It won’t be long now.

Internship is Walking Through a Large Colon

As internship assignment time approaches for Middlers, I thought a brief reflection on internship might be appropriate. And based on my experience, internship is like walking through a large, inflatable colon.


And I don't mean that metaphorically. On internship, I walked through a large, inflatable colon. When I arrived at church this morning, a large, pink, inflatable, walk through colon greeted me in the parking lot. My internship site parish, regularly hosts health seminars sponsored by the University of Tennessee Hospitals. Today's seminar just so happens to be on colon health, and so the inflatable colon made its trip to Messiah.

These seminars are a huge hit in the community. On seminar days our parking lot is filled, as hundreds of members of the local community show up for the seminar and their chance to walk through the colon. It is probably the most attended event offered here at Messiah. Many of the people who come to the health seminars are not members of the church. These seminars are one of the ways in which our church is open to and connected to the community and world. And I think the popularity of these seminars illustrates the need for the church to be in tune with the larger communities and its concerns and needs.

I must admit that demographics of the seminar attendees is on the older side. However, that did not stop our Children's Center kids from getting in on the fun. Enjoy the pictures and remember that sometimes the church is called to walk through large, inflatable colons.

God's Peace,
Zach

Lenten Meditation: 3rd Sunday in Lent

John 2:13-22

13 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. 15Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’

Meditation:

Immediately when I read “money changers” I had that picture of Bernie Madoff with his grin that you see in the papers. I had the images of the corporate executives who got major bonuses after receiving government bailout. The state of Illinois knows something about corrupt money changers...

This corrupt money-changing perpetuates poverty and injustice. The corrupt actions of a few can have extremely negative effects on the livelihood of the rest, and in a globalized world, even more so.

Jesus spills the coins of corruption and turns the tables that crush the poor and oppressed. In times of economic crisis and with record job losses and the lines growing outside of places (like the Living Room Café) that provide warm meals and job support...Jesus’ table turning is good news.

The tables that need turning are not limited to Wall Street and corrupt politicians, however. We’ve all got tables that need turning. We've all got things that get in the way...fears, insecurities, prejudices, excuses, pride, indifference, greed...
Lent is not only a time of giving things up, it’s a time to be honest about the tables in our lives that need turning.

Prayer: Oh Lord, turn the tables that crush the poor, turn the table that perpetuate injustice. If it gets in the way, turn it. Our pride, our greed, our indifference...May it all turn. May your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Guide us in our Lenten journey of table turning and empower us to be table turners, too. Amen.
Josh Ebener, MDiv Senior

Senior Class Gift

For All the Saints: Fair Trade Paraments Celebrate International
Community
Kirsten Fryer, MDiv Senior

When you walk into LSTC’s Augustana Chapel, you may notice that the window above the entrance is etched with a map of the world. At the bottom of the window, you see the words “For All the Saints.” This is a reminder that LSTC is indeed an international community. Our graduates serve as pastors, professors, and lay ministers all over the world. The intention of the folks who designed Augustana Chapel was that the paraments used in worship reflect that international mark of the LSTC community.

Currently, we have two sets of paraments that honor our international community. The scarlet set is made from Raj textile from India. It was purchased in 2003 and the paraments were used at the dedication of Augustana Chapel. Augustana’s blue set is made from Ewe cloth from Ghana.

After much discussion, the senior class has decided that we would like to add to this collection by giving a set of green paraments as our class gift. Our intention is to purchase fairly-traded cloth from artisans in Mexico, and with that cloth, make a chasuble, two stoles, and an altar frontal. We are currently corresponding with Marcario and Elena Pocop, a couple originally from Guatemala who fled to Mexico during the Guatemalan civil war in the early 1980s. Marcario and Elena are members of an artisans co-op in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

One of the reasons we chose to purchase cloth from Mexico is that the Youth in Mission students see the green paraments during their worship in Augustana chapel while they are in Chicago. We thought that it would be meaningful to make a connection for the entire LSTC community to our brothers and sisters in Mexico. Both the Youth in Mission students and LSTC students who participate in the ELCA Seminary’s Transformational Immersion program during J-term will have the opportunity to meet the artisans at CCIDD in Cuernavaca.

You can support the senior gift by attending the progressive dinner on March 20th, bidding on silent auction items this week, or writing a check to LSTC (include “senior class gift 2009” on the memo line and let Lynne Morrow know you donated by emailing her at lmorrow@lstc.edu)

International Students' Cultural Night

Last Friday international students at LSTC had a night of celebrating cultures, arts, dances and poetry from around the world. The night consisted of African-American Singing, a Turkish Movie, Hungarian Music, an Indian Song, Japanese Kabuki, a Chinese Poem, an Indian Dance, a Burmese Cultural Dance, various dress styles from Jerusalem, Ramallah and a display of various internatioanl greetings. Afterwards we enjoyed delicious food from all over the world.

Open Mic Night

Last Thursday we had an Open Mic Night where members of the seminary community showcased their talent (or lack there of). We had songs, dance, poetry, etc (see pictures). Each performer had a coin jar with their name on it, and we gave prizes to the top three performers with the most money in their jars.

We are raising money for our Senior Class Gift. Every year the senior class at LSTC leaves the school a gift. This year our gift will be fair trade paraments from Mexico that will go to the chapel. We will have a series of events and opportunities for people to contribute to the gift.

Lenten Meditations

During the season of Lent, LSTC students, faculty and staff will be writing Lenten Meditations on the weekly lectionary texts.
You can read these meditations here: http://www.lstc.edu/chapel/lent/

'The Transfiguration of Our Lord' or' Casimir Pulaski Day'

So, about a week ago I preached on the Transfiguration at my internship sites in Knoxville, Tennessee. I ended up preaching on the Elisha/Elijah text. This text describes the journey of Elisha alongside of Elijah, during Elijah's last days on earth, before he is swept up into the heavens by a whirlwind.

As I prepared to preach, I was drawn to Sufjan Steven's song, 'Casimir Pulaski Day.' The songs tells the story of someone's journey alongside of a girlfriend's last days with cancer. Here's the song on Austin City Limits:


[Pretty sweet winged outfits, right? Does anyone know if Augsburg produces a similar product?]

The back and forth exchange of dialogue between Elijah and Elisha ('Stay here' - 'I will not leave you') even seems to be mirrored as Sufjan sings:

"Oh the glory when you ran outside
With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied
And you told me not to follow you."

But one verse towards the end of the song I find particularly powerful:

"Oh the glory that the Lord has made
and the complications when I see his face
in the morning, in the window."

It seems to me that in the narrator's Elisha-like journey, he experiences the fullness of God's presence. On one hand, he proclaims the glory of the Lord throughout the song. In particular, Sufjan's song seems to point to the sustaining presence and love of God in the places of death and disease. On the other hand, the narrator has difficulty with the discipleship for which this good news calls. And in the end the narrator comes away with a "complicated" understanding of God.

In this song, I find a moving experience with the Lutheran theological dialectic, law and gospel. I normally am really attracted to this paradoxical theological insight. But what makes this song so powerful, is its description of a lived experience with this sometimes abstract theological idea. It reflects our struggle on the day of the Transfiguration as we search for the words to describe our experience with the fullness of God.

peace,
zach

ps - it was also a challenge to preach a sermon that prominently featured the words: elijah, elisha, and sufjan.

Regional assignments

This is my senior year at LSTC. I was positively "Approved" for ordained ministry in December. Approval is the last step in the candidacy process. Now our senior class is going through the ELCA Assignment process to receive a first call in a congregation. Last week (Wednesday) we received our Regional Assignments. Our senior class gathered together in a worship service as we received the news of which regions we would be assigned to. Later that night we had a party. The tradition is that the middler (second) year students throw the seniors a party for their regional assignments.
I was assigned to Region 2, the southwestern region of the country. Now that we have received our regional assignments, we will await a synod assignment within that region within the next couple of weeks. From there we will interview with congregation(s) and eventually receive a call to a congregation within that synod.
It is hard to believe that our class is finishing our last year of seminary. Now that we are going through the assignment process, it is starting to slowly set in that we will be leaving each other and moving onto the next phase of life, a call to ministry.

Review of "Working on a Dream"

Just for fun, I wrote up a sort of "theological review" of Working on a Dream, the 2009 album by one of my favorite musicians, Bruce Springsteen. Having good conversation about rock music, spirituality, and, well, Bruce Springsteen (thanks Rick!) is one of the things I've appreciated so much at LSTC.

Bruce Springsteen’s new album, Working on a Dream, begins in a nightmare.



It hits the ground running with “Outlaw Pete,” a song that begins with a tall tale and music that recalls hooves running through open country, like one of the sprawling romps on the The Seeger Sessions studio and live discs. It's a sweeping, widescreen epic of an album opener, clocking in at over 8 minutes long.

But then, without warning, the story changes. Outlaw Pete has a vision of his own death and flees to the West, where he tries to settle down. It doesn’t work. A bounty hunter finds him and declares, eerily, the line that haunts Pete, and hunts him, all the way to his mysterious end: “We cannot undo these things we’ve done…”

It's a line, and a theme, reminiscent of Bruce's last album, Magic, an album full of dread, anger, and impending, almost inescapable doom, with song titles like "Your Own Worst Enemy," "You'll Be Comin' Down," and "Last to Die." But on this new disc, Springsteen responds to the gathering clouds with a rather different response. At first glance, it seems like maybe he's trying to disprove the line, to say that maybe, just maybe, we can undo the things we've done. Further spins, however, reveal something rather deeper shining up through the album's surface.

It's worth wondering, as a theological exercise if nothing else, whether Bruce believes we can undo the deepest brokenness with our own two hands. One of my favorite songs on 2007's Magic is a song chock-full of Biblical imagery – “the late afternoon sun fills the room with a mist like the garden before the fall / I watch your hands smooth the front of your blouse and seven drops of blood fall” – but the song’s chorus declares that “I’ll work for your love dear / what others may want for free / I’ll work for your love.”



It’s a gorgeously vivid song, with some kind of truth undeniably coursing through it, and yet - from a theological perspective, it's uncomfortably transactional for a Lutheran understanding of the deepest unmerited Love. (This may, I should mention, require some rethinking in light of a recent observation of the powerfully transactional nature of certain forms of religious pilgrimage.)

In light of this tendency of Springsteen’s – going all the way back to “Prove It All Night,” my least favorite Bruce song precisely for the amorous deficiencies it shares with “I’ll Work for Your Love” – it is not unreasonable to worry that the new disc, with "Working" so prominent in the title, would follow in a similar vein. The title track paints a landscape of human work, work, work as the singleminded path to achieving a far-off Dream: “Rain pourin’ down I swing my hammer / My hands are rough from working on a dream / Sunrise come I climb the ladder / The new day breaks and I’m working on a dream…” Later there are more images of doing, doing, doing, as if maybe Outlaw Pete really can undo those things he’s done, on his own, with his own two hands, as the track “What Love Can Do” repeats its title line over and over: “Let me show you what love can do / let me show you what love can do…”

These are gorgeous images, reflecting the way good work can feel. And yet there are those Lutherans who, sometimes rightly so, worry that this perhaps glorifies the work a bit too much, sanctifying our Babylonian towers and ultimately creating a kind of - ugh, I hate this term - works-righteousness. My own instincts tend to be less concerned about our ascribing righteousness to good work than about the tendency of our work, our achievements, our credentials becoming the whole of our lives, with nothing underneath and around us to catch us when our hands, when our ladders, when our love inevitably fails.

Yet a second listen – especially in Springsteen songs (see “USA, Born in the”) – sometimes reveals a surprise lying beneath a simple chorus. "What Love Can Do" begins: “There’s a pillar in the temple where I carved your name / There’s a soul sitting sad and blue / Now the remedies you’ve taken are all in vain / Let me show you what love can do…”

There it is - remedies taken in vain. Failure: So often the moment when we move into a deeper level of understanding... And so what kind of understanding do we move toward as the song weaves it course?

Here the last verse reveals the song’s – and the album’s secret: “Here we bear the mark of Cain / We’ll let the light shine through / Let me show you what love can do.” And there it is: “Let the light shine through.” A Source, a holy Flame that pours light through through the windows like a sunbeam, illuminating the work and the dreams of all of the characters in Bruce's new album, like an unmerited mark that the Creator gives even to Cain - or Outlaw Pete, for that matter.

This glittering truth about the world finds its way into every nook and cranny of a Springsteen album that opens itself up with the orchestral arrangements nearly every critic has noted, spreading its musical wings wide like a bird soaring overhead - or underneath. Look at the album’s liner notes: Every page is a photograph of a natural landscape in a vivid color: a golden wheat field at dawn; a forest illuminated by the deep blue of midnight. The truth conveyed in all this? It's rather simple, painfully so, really, as simple as what Chris calls the unabashed sentimentality of the title track:

Life is beautiful.

I know, I know, almost too simple, right? Except, that is, when it's illustrated by the poetry of music or the music of poetry. It’s like a rock and roll reverberation of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem “God’s Grandeur,” which is what I keep thinking of as I listen to the album over and over (thanks, Pastor Miller, for pointing me in GMH's direction so many months ago):

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

This, this is heart of Working on a Dream. For me, the album’s centerpiece is “Queen of the Supermarket.” Sure, it’s a cheesy story of a guy with a crush on the girl working the checkout counter. And yet, and yet: The music swells with a love so full, a heart so melted, and the lyrics, well…just read them: “With my shopping cart I move through the heart / Of a sea of fools so blissfully unaware / That they’re in the presence of something wonderful and rare…”



The song blooms, and the album’s other songs bloom around it, with lyrics that lift up the Grace coursing through every molecule of creation: “A beauty in the neighborhood / This lonely planet never looked so good…” More: “I watch the sun as it rises and sets / I watch the moon trace its arc with no regrets…” And finally, just before the closing song, a benediction: “In the hollow of the evening / As you lay your head to rest / May the evening stars scatter a shining / Crown upon your breast / In the darkness of the morning as the sky / Struggles to light / May the rising sun caress and / Bless your soul for all your life.”

Return, for a moment, to Magic, an album whose muscular moodiness expressed a feeling about an America that was rapidly losing its soul: “We cannot undo these things we’ve done…”

Yet in the 15 months since Magic was released, Bruce’s beloved country actually seemed to take some pretty important steps down the “Long Walk Home” that concluded Magic, a long walk back toward an America where “nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.” Whenever the songs on Working on a Dream were composed, they sound now like the songs of a people surprised by joy, a people who have tried their hardest to tear down their world, only to find – wonder of all gracious wonders – that Hope, Faith, and Love still remain, that somehow the Spirit still broods over (and under) a bent and broken world with "warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

Never one to offer easy answers, Bruce no doubt chose his album title carefully, releasing a week after Inauguration Day an album whose title track reminds us that the long walk home is still going to be a long walk, that the dream, as the song says, will no doubt, feel so far away, that there will be lots of grassroots working on the way to any dream. There is, still, a very, very long way to go. We are still, as Oscar Romero said, prophets of a future not our own.

But the Truth embedded beneath every song on the album, from the title track on down, is the surprise of an unmerited and ever-present Grace, a Grace as relentless as anything that hunts Outlaw Pete, a Grace that fills and re-fills us with every breath we take in a still-wondrous creation, a Grace that fills us for the work we are empowered to do and draws us closer, ever closer to little dreams and big ones alike.

These are the fields we work in; and this is the work we do. Our lucky day, indeed.

My Brush With History

Above: One of the many independently-created t-shirts being sold in the parks and on the street corners of Chicago last summer.

Some kind of disclaimer is in order, I suppose, for any post that begins with a big ol' photo of Obama at the top. While social change and the political machinery that effects it are critically important to my life as a Christian and as a future pastor, I usually I try to steer clear of cheerleading particular parties and specific candidates, in my ministry, and on this blog, too. And this post is really no different. It's not really a post about politics at all, but a personal story about my time in Chicago, and my time at LSTC.

Two years ago, my wife and I were walking back from dinner, probably at Medici's, when I noticed a sign on the door of 57th Street Books advertising a book signing by a local author. 57th Street Books has these kinds of signings all the time; usually the authors teach at the University of Chicago or are outside academics stopping at the U of C as part of a conference or whatnot. The author this time? Former University of Chicago Law Professor Barack Obama.

I had first heard of Obama from a tiny blip in The Economist, who mentioned him as part of their coverage of the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois. It was still during the primaries, and I remember the Economist mentioned something about how he was a Chicagoan and his name began with "O" but he wasn't Irish. A few months later, I caught Obama's speech live during the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and I remember my jaw being on the floor about halfway through the speech when he declared that "when a child on the South Side of Chicago can't read, that matters to me, even when it's not my child." And then I distinctly remember leaping off the bed when he declared that "we worship an awesome God in the blue states," which in retrospect seems kind of hard to explain, but you have to remember that at that time the idea that you could be both Christian and progressive was not conventional wisdom in either Christian or progressive camps.

I read Obama's first book, Dreams from My Father, a few months later, and I remember what a page-turner it was for me; I really couldn't put it down. In his reflections on race, I heard echoes of Ralph Ellison, but I also saw a reflection of my own life, standing as it was at a crossroads that winter, as the pages told the story of a young man making sense of where he came from and what he should do. I'd read lots of books before then as I struggled with the roots and fruits of vocation, but here, to my surprise, was an author more carefully thoughtful than most of the thinkers I'd read in college and just as determined as I was to figure out the world.

Two years later Chris and I took a summer road trip to West Virginia, where I explored my own family's roots, and then on to Washington, D.C., where we, two addicts of The West Wing, had wanted to visit for awhile. We stopped at Obama's Senate Office to pick up two tickets to the Senate viewing gallery. There was a White Sox flag hanging on his office door - the Southsiders had won the World Series only a year before. When the friendly receptionist asked us where we were from, we left Indiana behind and said we were from Hyde Park. In only a few weeks, after all, it would be true. Later that year we moved to Chicago, and I began a new stage of my journey at LSTC. And that's when I saw the poster on the door of 57th Street Books.

The book signing, for The Audacity of Hope, was scheduled for the Tuesday of fall break, when I had no morning classes. None of my classmates seemed to be talking much about it, but then again, I mostly kept to myself in those first few months, nervous, determined, introverted, and, truth be told, a little freaked out after that first candidacy interview. When Tuesday morning arrived I took no chances: I woke up early and arrived at 6am for an event scheduled to start at 8am. A line already snaked around the corner of the building.

I stood in line between another young white student like myself and a older black woman who worked at the DuSable Museum for African-American History located only a few blocks away. It was a damp October day and it rained intermittently, so we shared an umbrella while we waited. And we talked. It was probably inevitable, given why we were all there, that we talked about Obama and what we thought he meant, and how he reflected some of our own hopes and dreams for our country, and for our city.

After awhile a black SUV pulled up to the bookstore, and Obama bounded out and waved at us as he headed into the bookstore, jerking his head up and offering a "Hey guys, how's it goin'?" as if we were all old friends. Then the signing began, and the line moved forward steadily. All the while I kept trying to think of what I would say to him when it was my turn. There was all this talk around that time about whether he was going to run for president, and somehow I was convinced, against all reason, that there was something profound I could say to him. I wracked my brain for twenty minutes at least, but came up with nothing. Maybe I could just thank him for his service.

Finally it was almost my turn. The person in front of me took a little longer than everyone else, because, as Obama explained to one of the store's personnel, "This woman delivered my babies!" They exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, and then it was my turn. The future President of the United States looked me in the eye, smiled, and shook my hand, then looked down again to sign my books. Now! Thank him for his service or something! Nooo, I can't! I'm too nervous! As he scribbled his name, he asked me what I did. I concentrated really hard and got the words out: "I'm a student," I said, "at the seminary here." Of course, I immediately knew that he would probably assume that I was at the University of Chicago Divinity School, but what was I going to do? I had neither the time nor the presence of mind to explain that "I am a student at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, one of the eight seminaries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran church body in North America!" Whatever. Then he said something about how he liked the food there (?), and asked me how I liked the program. "It's great," I said, truthfully. "I love it." He wished me luck with my studies and handed me three signed copies of his book. I thanked him and walked away, my brush with history over.

I like telling that story, partly because it fits perfectly whenever conversations inevitably move to the topic of who's met the coolest famous person? Everyone needs a celebrity story for moments like these.

Of course, the story's strength is also exactly what's wrong with it. It confirms the stereotype of Obama as a celebrity whose supporters - like me - sometimes treat him like a fifth Beatle. I think that's probably okay when we're trading celebrity stories, but if that is the totality of our view of the 44th president, if his role as a leader of people ends there, then that's probably not so good, which is why making MLK Day a day of national service is a step in the right direction.

As for my own brush with history, to my great good fortune it was only one moment in a longer journey through the streets of Chicago. A few months after meeting then-Senator Obama, I was accepted into the Urban CPE program, and spent three months doing pastoral care in a homeless shelter on Chicago's North Side. The following autumn I began working in a parish church on the South Side of the city, in the same neighborhood where Obama began his community organizing some two decades earlier. Both experiences sparked a growing love for urban ministry and a deepening commitment to the urban community, its continuing struggles and its collective joys.

All of which is but one more reason why I'm grateful for the two years I've spent in Chicago. The brushes with celebrity, complete with fun stories, are a nice perk. But even better has been the chance to leave the sidelines and be the change I wish to see in the world - on Inauguration Day, and beyond.

A Herald of Good Tidings

Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!”
-Isaiah 40:9


My friend and seminary colleague Zach recently wrote a reflection on Advent as a time of entering into the dark of nighttime and discovering God’s presence there just as much as in the light of daytime. He concludes:

“While the rest of the world squirms in the darkness seeking out the light, take comfort during this Advent season that God is active and present in this world, even though it may be dark.”

I think Zach is right. Here in Mexico, where I’ve been living and studying for the last five months, I’ve been thinking a lot about God’s activity in places where I am full of doubt and fear, whether they are light or dark. Last month I visited Acteal, the site of a massacre of more than forty-five mostly women and children only a decade ago. The horrors of what happened there were overwhelming.

Yet every month, the survivors of Acteal gather to remember the victims. They speak their names aloud and declare their continued presence among the living. They take a page from Isaiah and on a high mountain (literally) they lift up their voices with strength and announce the dawn of a new world, a world of justice and of peace, a world of hope and of love.

It takes a radical faith to declare that such a world can possibly be born at a time when most of us have grown too weary and wary of hope to believe it. But in Advent, a time Melissa Etheridge calls “the season of change,” we remember – and we announce – that God is, against all odds, bringing about that very birth.

Last week Amnesty International released a song called “The Price of Silence,” highlighting just how powerful our announcing voices can be. “Raise your voices to the sky,” sing the different artists in their different languages. “The price of silence is much too high.”

Isaiah, I think, would agree. So let us raise our voices this Advent season. Let us be the signs of what God is bringing to birth, little by little, every day.

Prayer: God of hope, in a world that considers poverty, injustice, and violence to be normal, give us the strength to be your “herald of good tidings” announcing the birth of Your new world.

Make your Advent faith active in love: Lift up your voice by signing Amnesty International’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Prayers of Intercession

The following are prayers by LSTC student Birgitte Jeppesen from LSTC's chapel service last Thursday...

God your kingdom is justice and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, come to us now and open in us the gates to your kingdom.

God stay with us in the dawning of a new day

A fresh start

To live in your loving hands

Stay with us in relationships

Nurture us

Stay with us

In the political times of uncertainty

Where duties wait and opportunities are born.

Help and guide us to turn the challenges, hopes and opportunities, privately and politically, into action that transforms, build up and reconcile what is broken.

Guide leaders to use their power wisely for the fellow good of everyone, also the people whose voice is not heard.

Help us to live our new day in trust, not fear.

So we this very day, may show forth your light

God stay with us.

Where the day becomes night.

Where lives are destroyed and creativity killed

Where laughter, singing and story sharing is mute

Where compassion and trust do not exist

Where fear is the master

And injustice rule

Stay with us where night rules

In structures and institution in our societies designed to destroy and dehumanize human beings.

The School of the Americas, prison cells, chambers of torture, cold corners of the city.

God we pray, conquest the night.

Conquest anything that prevent your creation to unfold and flourish.

May your resurrected light reach out to the corners of darkness.

God awaken us.

That we may see clearly the beauty - in your creation, in each other and in ourselves

Help us to make the world more beautiful, just, funny, and peaceful, in each of our unique and creative ways.

And remind us that even when we are tired, insecure, sad, or stressed you receive us and bring forth the best in us.

We leave our lives, our dear ones and all the people we meet during this day in your loving hands.

Amen.